To James Geikie 19 July 1880
Down | Beckenham Kent. &c.
July 19th. 1880—
My dear Sir.
Your letter has pleased me very much. & I truly feel it an honour that any thing which I wrote on the drift &c. should have been of the least use or interest to you.— Pray make any use of my letter; I forget whether it was written carefully or clearly, so pray touch up any passages that you may think fit to quote—1
All that I have seen since near Southampton & elsewhere has strengthened my notion— Here I live on a Chalk platform gently sloping down from the edge of the escarpment to the S. (which is about 800 ft in height.) to beneath the tertiary beds to the north— The beds of the large & broad valleys (& only of these) are covered with an immense mass of closely packed broken & angular flints; in which mass the skull of the Musk Ox & wooly elephant have been found—2 This great accumulation of unworn flints must therefore have been made when the climate was cold, & I believe it can be accounted for by the larger valleys having been filled up to a great depth during a large part of the year with drifted frozen snow—over which rubbish from the upper parts of the platforms was washed by the summer rains—sometimes along one line & sometimes along another; or in channels cut through the snow all along the main course of the broad valleys.3
I suppose that I formerly mentioned to you the frequent upright position of elongated flints in the red Clayey residue over the chalk, which residue gradually subsides into the troughs & pipes corroded in the solid chalk— This letter is very untidy, but I am tired—
Pray believe me, My dear Sir. | Yours sincerely. | Ch: Darwin.
P.S. | Several palæolithic celts4 have recently been found in the great angular gravel-bed near Southampton in several places—
Footnotes
Bibliography
Geikie, James. 1881. Prehistoric Europe: a geological sketch. London: Edward Stanford.
Summary
Gives permission to use letter [10676].
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-12663
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- James Murdoch (James) Geikie
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- DAR 144: 332
- Physical description
- C 2pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 12663,” accessed on 27 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12663.xml